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Friday, October 03, 2008

A very public attempt 4

When I was younger poetry was easy to identify. It was something that rhymed and had been written by someone long dead. Then I stumbled upon free verse. Everything changed.

I give you a sample. It's really nice. But why is it poetry? And why isn't it just broken up lines? As ever, resist googling for the poet.

Drawing the Line

What could be simpler than this? To distinguish past from future, old from new.

To turn the year like a page, rediscover our taste for happy endings, our need for regret.

“You have to draw the line somewhere” you say.

But always the hand trembles, the eye fails, and the heart cannot keep its memories straight.

Life, like poetry, is never drawn to scale.

How strange that the shortest distance between two points should be our most fundamental of separations –

the line, that can both emphasise and cancel –

so that you draw a margin on the blank page not only to underline the emptiness, but also to make it yours.

We exist in a world of shapes and parallels, imagining lines everywhere – stencils of states we partition our maps with, checkerboards of calendars, and the diagonal of God, dividing eternity from oblivion –

we are like children cutting their food into squares, inventing definition to make the world easier.

You could say this is make-believe: that the border between what was and what will be is too absently crossed; that the songbirds cannot tell night from day, past from possibility.

Yet how could we live without the parentheses of beginning and end? How could we hope without Time’s punctuation?

We exist in the hair’s-breadth of the immediate, creasing the stationery of our years with birth, death and festival to mark our place in it.

Let it be so: to believe in the trivial is to have a faith that cannot be shaken.

Let us celebrate this day not in the illusion that things will change, or that the spilling over of time’s circle means something,

but in the knowledge that this day is special because we share it with each other.